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1. no difference as far as i know, two different ways at getting same data.
2. the use ihtml basically because it is a different name for a template file. It is just what that author has wanted to call their template files as opposed to normal html files. If you renamed them to .html or .txt or .anything it would still work.
3. that just runs through all the data that was sent by the browser (i think only the user input) 1 by 1 so you can validate the input, ie just looping through the $HTTP_POST_VARS array.

Also in some situations it is better to use $HTTP_POST_VARS array because if someone taps onto the URL like
something.php?first=somethingpeculiar
then in some situations that can corrupt your processing and things if say $first is only meant to be a number, so you would use $HTTP_POST_VARS to only get the data that was POSTED in the form, rather than using data that was sent using the GET method. So what you would do would be to extract $HTTP_POST_VARS and thus it will overwrite anything a user has tried to tap onto the URL. Of course you should always be checking for the right sort of data when you process the form anyway.